Astronautix Taken Offline due to DDOS Attack

djolds1 · Post by **djolds1** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 5:28 am

http://www.astronautix.com/

Due to a persistent denial of service attack, astronautix.com has been taken off line.

Thank you for your support over the last 17 years. I'll have to consider in what altered media, form, or other hosting arrangement the content of this site may reappear in the future.

Per aspera ad astra

Betruger · Post by **Betruger** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 6:14 am

Any idea who's responsible for the DOSA?

Giorgio · Post by **Giorgio** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 6:20 am

This is absolutely crazy nonsense. Who in the world could have interests in DDOSing astronautix.com?

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 10:46 am

This is absolutely crazy nonsense. Who in the world could have interests in DDOSing astronautix.com?

Exactly! Just shows how stupid and moronic these people are that conduct such nonsense! I wished they would rather put their talents to good use and do DOSA on those websites that promote themselves via the tons of spam on the web, mainly online pharmazies and online casinos.
But who can understand what is going on in the mind of a guy who DOSes astronautix...
Just unbelieveable!

Scupperer · Post by **Scupperer** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 12:48 pm

While I wouldn't expect much of a response, report it to the FBI, as it is a crime.

KitemanSA · Post by **KitemanSA** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 3:47 pm

I wonder if this is someone who wants an auto update every year and typed in 1ys so is was getting one every yacto-second.

kurt9 · Post by **kurt9** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 4:04 pm

That's too bad. Astronautix was the best space history site ever.

ladajo · Post by **ladajo** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 5:02 pm

Now this truly sucks, and the hosting agency could not give any info on the sourcing of the attack?

WTF? What idiot would have any possible thing to gain from this...

ScottL · Post by **ScottL** » Tue Jul 12, 2011 5:29 pm

Find a host with ping protection, an IDS running, and if you have the money get round-robin cluster hosting which divides your page views among a few servers instead of just one. EX: If you get 100 views a minute across 5 servers, that means every server is handling 20 requests per minute. When a DDoS attack occurs the attack is spread across several servers instead of 1 server that will be saturated by requests.

Just some thoughts...

GIThruster · Post by **GIThruster** » Wed Jul 13, 2011 7:03 am

and please do report it. USG makes a lot more arrests for this sort of thing than you'd guess.

http://www.cybercrime.gov/

hanelyp · Post by **hanelyp** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 1:46 am

ladajo wrote:Now this truly sucks, and the hosting agency could not give any info on the sourcing of the attack?

That's the nature of a Distributed Denial of Service. The attack is launched from bots all over the place. And most of the people whose computers were used probably have no idea.

krenshala · Post by **krenshala** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 1:57 am

ScottL wrote:Find a host with ping protection, an IDS running, and if you have the money get round-robin cluster hosting which divides your page views among a few servers instead of just one. EX: If you get 100 views a minute across 5 servers, that means every server is handling 20 requests per minute. When a DDoS attack occurs the attack is spread across several servers instead of 1 server that will be saturated by requests.

Just some thoughts...

While this does help, it usually isn't enough unless the attack is of very low volume.

Most of the time the problem isn't with the server being able to fulfill all of the malicious requests, but the fact that all of the malicious traffic has saturated at least the server's network connection, if not the host's (depending on the size of the attack). I've seen DDOSes range from ~100Mbps (barely enough to take down a typical server network connection) to 5Gbps+ (more than enough to bring a smaller hosting provider down until the traffic is null-routed by the hosting provider's access providers (the big names in the Internet)).

Either way, its rediculous that someone would target that kind of website. I also recommend reporting it, or having the hosting provider report it (if they haven't already).

zapkitty · Post by **zapkitty** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 7:29 pm

The original version, not updated since Oct 2001, but still live

http://www.friends-partners.org/partner ... aceflt.htm

Or, the wayback machine has a snapshot from October of 2010:

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http:/ ... nautix.com

Details of the attack would be useful if Mark Wade can spare the time to provide them. Actual DDOS or just an accidental DOS?

Had an accidental DOS once... a government archive had put up a pdf on the relationship between the Soviet missile design bureau and the Soviet manned space program but the archive interface had been privatized and was a proprietary corporate clusterfuck.

People running a variety of OS's couldn't get at the file so I tossed a copy on a small file drop I hosted to the few people I knew would be interested... and then spent the next couple of days wondering why LLNL had launched a DOS attack on my file drop

Giorgio · Post by **Giorgio** » Thu Jul 14, 2011 8:16 pm

zapkitty wrote:People running a variety of OS's couldn't get at the file so I tossed a copy on a small file drop I hosted to the few people I knew would be interested... and then spent the next couple of days wondering why LLNL had launched a DOS attack on my file drop

Funny one

IntLibber · Post by **IntLibber** » Wed Jul 27, 2011 3:45 am

ya if someone say, at slashdot did an article on some space topic and linked to an astronautix image, that would DDOS the site.

On the other hand, spammers are doing DDOS a lot to try to compromise SQL databases and test for various sql injection methods, as a means of posting spam links to their sites once they figure out a working injection method.